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Among early Hollywood’s most renowned filmmakers, Lois Weber was considered one of the era’s “three great minds” alongside D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Despite her accomplishments, Weber has been marginalized in relation to her contemporaries, who have long been recognized as fathers of American cinema. Drawing on a range of materials untapped by previous historians, Shelley Stamp offers the first comprehensive study of Weber’s remarkable career as director, screenwriter, and actress. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood provides compelling evidence of the extraordinary role that women played in shaping American movie culture.

Weber made films on capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and addiction, establishing cinema’s power to engage topical issues for popular audiences. Her work grappled with the profound changes in women’s lives that unsettled Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her later films include sharp critiques of heterosexual marriage and consumer capitalism. Mentor to many women in the industry, Weber demanded a place at the table in early professional guilds, decrying the limited roles available for women on-screen and in the 1920s protesting the growing climate of hostility toward female directors. Stamp demonstrates how female filmmakers who had played a part in early Hollywood’s bid for respectability were in the end written out of that industry’s history. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood is an essential addition to histories of silent cinema, early filmmaking in Los Angeles, and women’s contributions to American culture.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Portrait of a Filmmaker1. Creating a Signature2. “Life’s Mirror”: Progressive Films for a Progressive Era3. Women’s Labor, Creative Control, and “Independence” in a Changing Industry4. “Exit Flapper, Enter Woman”; or, Weber in Jazz Age HollywoodConclusion: “Forgotten with a Vengeance”

NotesFilmographyIndex

Shelley Stamp is author of Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon; coeditor of American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices; and founding editor of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal. She is Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"A brilliant researcher and a masterful historian, Shelley Stamp gives us an always fascinating and incisive portrait of one of the silent era’s foremost filmmakers. Much more than a powerful biography of an unjustly marginalized figure, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood asks its readers to thoroughly reimagine American cinema of the 1910s and 1920s. This is an essential work of film history—a stunning achievement." —Charles Musser, Yale University